DEATH DOESN'T FORGET

A big Taipei lottery prize spells disaster for the winner and everyone around him.

The preliminary squabbles between Boxer, a grifting bartender and bouncer in the BaBa Bar, and his live-in girlfriend, BaBa barmaid Siu-lien, about whom the promised NT$200,000 really belongs to, signal further troubles to come. Of course Boxer will claim the money without Siu-lien; of course he’ll throw around much of it before he has to see her again; of course he’ll go back to the pigsty he was living in before they moved in together while he still has some cash on hand. When Siu-lien asks her daughter Nancy’s boyfriend, Chen Jing-nan, to face Boxer down and demand Siu-lien’s share, he succeeds in extracting only NT$21,500 from him, which he describes as good news and bad news. But no one would have predicted that Boxer would be slashed to death shortly afterward, or that Jing-nan, spotted by security cameras leaving Boxer’s building around the time of his death, would be arrested by Capt. Huang, carried off from Unknown Pleasures, the food stand he runs in the Shilin Night Market, and tortured in hope of extracting a confession. And certainly no one would ever have predicted that the next victim would be Capt. Huang himself. After these twists, the identification of the killer comes as less of a surprise; what lingers in the memory, as always in the Taipei Night Market novels, is the flavorsome portrait of the city, this time with particular and highly effective attention to its Aboriginal Australian population.

Maybe not better than a trip to Taipei but more likely in these troubled times.